Yes, hello, everything!

About customer loyalty and keeping your marketing promises

 

Had a less than perfect air travel experience last week.

Because of poor ticket availability, hearing the warning bells ring, we had to book a route with two relatively tight connections. The first leg went fine, but then little by little it all started to fall apart.

Firstly, the second plane boarded late “due to the late arrival of the incoming aircraft” (doesn’t it make you mad when they say that?), but we figured out we’d still make it if all else goes well. It didn’t. We rolled for fifty meters and then returned to wait for a mechanic because of “a technical failure”. To inquiries about how people could still make their connections, the purser replied that he is not a magician. A night in an airport hotel it was, then.

That wasn’t the most annoying thing on the flight, though.

On the plane there was extensive marketing going on about free Internet onboard. On the back of every seat they had stickers like this:

 

This gave us hope that we could at least make a witty social media remark about the world’s most punctual airline later.

What we got, however, was this:

Unable to connect to the server, that is. I would have been perfectly happy without wifi on the flight, but after frequent trying with similar error messages I felt really disappointed and somehow even more mad about the delay too. It was a prime example about how not to market a new service to an end user.

But all this doesn’t matter in the end. I know we will be taking the same airline next time again. There are two reasons for that. Firstly, we don’t have too many options from our town. Secondly, this airline deals out this:

This bait for the children onboard has resulted in our son becoming the most brand loyal airline customer I have ever seen. Every time we fly, he checks which company we will be using, because “the other one does not give you toys”.

So as a consequence of a one-euro bag, our whole family ends up preferring the same carrier time and time again.

How is that for a return on investment?

The Internet makes me appreciate creative work

 

Since the post about my creative block a couple of weeks ago, I have considered recognition of creativity in the Internet age.

We all know how anybody today can be an author and how amateur videos online get publicity like never before. The only thing you need for publishing a creative deed is an Internet connection.

A common claim is that because of all this, the Internet generation no longer understands the value of professional creative work. You won’t need newspapers when you can read free blogs, and there is no point of paying an expert for high quality photographs when you can ask the crowd to provide a cloudful of shots.

What I have been thinking about is the exact opposite.

Writing this blog has made me admire professional writing even more. It takes time and dedication to do this well and I no longer have fantasies about becoming an author (well, I still have, but I can now better assess how realistic they are...).

I also enjoy quality journalism more. Finding interesting topics and investigating important phenomena is hard work. Writing captivating articles about them is even harder. A knowledgeable well-written article on a burning matter is a rare luxury these days.

Similarly, comparing mobile snapshot art (like the one above) with high quality pictures and films in the Internet can make people acknowledge the work and vision behind great photography. I simply can’t do this with my camera.

I assume the same would apply to an aspiring garage band. It may be easier to approve the role of an experienced producer and professional marketing when you have tried distributing recordings from the band’s own website with little success.

So if you are journalist doing background research for a large reportage, an author struggling with a new novel, a professional photographer working long nights to get that perfect shot or a producer fine-tuning the next hit single in a studio, I guess what I am trying to say is: Thank you. I appreciate it.